A project is one website. For an agency that usually means one client; for an in-house team it usually means one property. Everything the app measures — rankings, audits, Search Console data, content monitoring, AI visibility — hangs off a project, because every one of those questions is only answerable about a specific domain.
Who this is for
Everyone. You cannot do anything useful in PageOptimized without at least one project, and the shape of your project list is what everything else inherits: access is granted per project, credit budgets can be set per project, and client portals share exactly one project.
Creating one
You need a domain and a market — the country and language rankings should be checked in. Both can be changed later, but changing the market resets what historical position data means, so it is worth getting right at the start.
Who can create projects: workspace owners and admins always. Everyone else depends on a setting on their invitation — see People and access. A specialist who onboards their own clients should have it on. A contractor hired for two named projects usually should not.
When someone who is scoped to specific projects creates one, they are automatically made its admin. Otherwise they would have created something they could not open.
One project per domain, not per campaign
The most common setup mistake is splitting one site across several projects — one for the blog, one for the shop, one for a rebrand. Rankings, audits and Search Console all work at domain level, so splitting them means every number is computed against a fraction of the site and none of them agree with each other.
If you need to look at part of a site separately, use filters and segments inside the project rather than a second project.
Subdomains are a judgement call
A subdomain that is really a separate business — a help centre on a different platform, a regional site with its own team — is worth its own project. A subdomain that is part of the same site is not.
The test: would you write a separate report about it for a different person? If yes, separate project.
Archiving
Archive a project when an engagement ends. It disappears from the list, stops running scheduled work, and stops spending credits — but keeps its history, so restoring it later brings back the whole record rather than starting from zero.
Archive rather than delete when a client might come back. Most do.
What a project costs
Nothing by itself. Projects are not billed, and there is no project limit. What costs credits is the work you run inside one — rank checks, audits, keyword research, AI visibility probes. A dormant project with no schedules costs nothing at all.
This is deliberate: you should be able to set up a prospective client and look around before deciding whether to take them on.
Next
- People and access
- What each section of the app is for
- What a credit is, and what uses them